okay i have my beige g3 and i want to use it as a server to back up my 5 other running machines at least weekly.

does anyone know of applescripts, freeware, not-so-freeware, or anything else that would allow me to mount specific volumes from each machine back them up then dismount the volumes all at a scheduled time? i've been looking and might have found something. but just wondering if anyone has foudn anything that would suite this very purpose...

i want to set up an auto-backup-server cause as much as i try i never remember to back up my hard drives.

You wouldn't have to become a scripting genius to do this.You can use cron to run your script at the desired times, or simply run it as a login script Though this may slow the machine down for a little bit while you are trying to use it.

You can drop afp servers into your list of login items, then your script would only need to run a cp terminal command or two to copy the required folders onto the network volume. You might be able to do it with automator. Then you can use cron to schedule the backups, or you could attach a shutdown command on the end of the script, then when you feel inclined, finish using the machine, run the script and it will back itself up and shut itself down.

Don't try too hard on this, a family pack of Leopard will do this for you much better with Time Machine. And the server wouldn't need to be running Leopard in order to do it either.

I don't really know anything about writing scripts, but if you make the part that tells the computer to back itself up, you can set iCal events to run scripts, so you'd just make the event, tell it to run the script and repeat it however often you want.

War- do you know if you could use a non-apple box for the backup with time machine? I've got an old P2 that i'm going to set up sometime soon for server-ing

well since it's a beige G3 i don't think i'll have to worry too much about trying to run leopard on it :) admittedly this will be the first time to set up a server (also the first time i have had an extra computer to suit the purpose) what is "cron"? and i guess i should start looking up some commandline scripts/promts/commands (since i haven't used that much either)

When you setup Time Machine, it asks you to choose backup destination. You don't seem to be able to drag your boot drive into the list, but afp servers show up automatically. My bet is if the Finder can mount it and write to it, Time Machine can use it.

cron is a system tool which runs 'maintenance' scripts at scheduled times. It can be modified to include extra scripts and to change the times it runs. There is a shareware app which provides a GUI front end to it, I forget what its called.

If you want to learn the terminal or scripting, I would search over on the oreilly network. They print many Mac textbooks and have alot of useful stuff on their site. The Jaguar based terminal tutorial is still close enough to be of use in Tiger.

the 'man' command can be used with another command as its argument to display the maual for that command. This tells you what it does and how it should be used. Open Terminal and type: "man cd"This will display the manual for the cd or change directory command. press q to get out of a manual page.

What are you looking to back up, the entire system, users folders, applications folders, shared folders? Depending on how hard core you want to get the paid for Retropect Server can do it for you, but it cost money. Let me know what you have found and I will suggest others. The other possibility is to try doing it with something like carbon copy cloner (shareware I think, but well worth it).

There are other options out there, but it all depends on how much you want to backup. If I were looking to do the cheapest way it would be the free way of partitioning out the biege hard drives (uh.. how are you doing that by the way, connected firewire drive? or PCI SATA card?). Once partitioned you could write a simple applescript or shell script to mount drives and DITTO the files (don't cp the files, doesn't always take the resource forks).

Let me know more of what you want and I'll share what scripting knowledge I can with you.

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